be read as a radical subversion of the superiority of the West: “Supposedly primitive behaviors were seen to lurk not only in the pathological and in the past, but in the everyday customs and in the great cultural institutions of modern European civilized public and private life,” Brickman is quick to add. “In the end, we are all more or less neurotic; we are all more or less primitive; we are all saurians among the horsetails.”17 Or, to make the same point in the words of Ana, the sickly artist-character from José Martí’s novel Lucía Jerez: “Of wild beasts I know two kinds: one dresses in skins, devours animals, and walks on claws; the other dresses in elegant suits, eats animals and souls, and walks with a walking stick or umbrella. We are nothing more than reformed beasts.”18 Similarly, Freud writes in The Interpretation of Dreams; “What once dominated waking life, when the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night—just as the primitive weapons, the bows and arrows, that have been abandoned by adult men, turn up once more in the nursery.”19 What we could infer from this, aside from a conventional gender portrayal, is the possibility of a truly revolutionary—rather than merely evolutionary—awakening of that which lies dormant in the present. This possibility resembles the way in which Marx imagines his task as a radical thinker in a letter to Arnold Ruge:
It will become evident that the world has long possessed the dream of something, of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind begins no new work, but consciously brings its old work to completion.20
What is more, in Freud’s case, too, we come across an interesting paradox similar to Marx’s tardy discovery of the logic of uneven development. As the late Edward Said showed in his lecture Freud and the Non-European, not only might we expect Freud to have arrived at a critique of the ideological notion of primitivism, based on his own experience with the ideologies of racism and anti-Semitism in Europe which forced him to seek refuge in London and eventually brought him back for a visit to America—“Little do they know we are bringing them the plague,” Freud is famously said to have proclaimed when, just a little over 100 years ago he first disembarked, with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, in New York, perhaps still secretly comparing himself to Columbus, only now in terms of the discoverer’s epidemic effects. But, furthermore, the later so-called “social” or “culturalist” works of Freud, above all Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism, also contain radical concepts of the structural lack of adaptation of the human species and the presence of a kernel of non-identity at the heart of every identity, including that of the Jewish faith, which could have brought the founding father of psychoanalysis to the point of questioning the effects of his own limited historicism and the temptations of Eurocentrism. “For Freud, writing and thinking in the mid-1930s, the actuality of the non-European was its constitutive presence as a sort of fissure in the figure of Moses—founder of Judaism, but an unreconstructed non-Jewish Egyptian none the less,” proposes Said. “Yahveh derived from Arabia, which was also non-Jewish and non-European.”21 Had he applied this radical principle of non-identity to other non-European cultures, our discoverer of the unconscious also could have had more than just a metaphorical connection to Latin America.
In addition to these missed encounters between Marx and Latin America, or between Freud and Latin America, we also have to take into account the obstacles that stand in the way of a proper articulation between Marx and Freud themselves. These are the obstacles that the various attempts at formulating some type or other of Freudo-Marxism have tried to overcome—to varying and, in the eyes of many, highly questionable degrees of success—from the earliest efforts by Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, via the parallel yet unfortunately non-synchronous tracks of the likes of Herbert Marcuse or Erich Fromm in the Frankfurt School in the 1950s and 1960s, and French thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard, or the combination of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who in the 1970s threw Nietzsche into the Marx-Freud mix, all the way to the recent work of someone like Slavoj Žižek who, rather than a Freudo-Marxist, would have to be considered a proponent of Lacano-Althusserianism by way of Hegel. In Latin America, though this too tends to be forgotten, there also exists a fascinating tradition in this regard—from the presence of Fromm in Mexico between 1950 and 1973 or the establishment of a psychoanalytical community between 1961 and 1964 in a Cuernavacan monastery by the soon-to-be-excommunicated Benedictine monk of Belgian origin, Gregorio Lemercier, via the collective project for a Freudian Left spearheaded throughout much of the region, from Uruguay to Argentina to Mexico, by the Jewish-Austrian exile Marie Langer (co-founder of the Argentine Psychoanalytical Association who described her own trajectory as a journey “from Vienna to Managua” under the Sandinistas), all the way to the Sartrean-inflected Lacanianism of Oscar Masotta in Argentina, or the Brazilian Suely Rolnik’s schizoanalytical collaborations with Guattari.22
Here, I should admit, we might be victims of amnesia to the second degree. Indeed, as I realized only recently, already in Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Laing, the historian of Western Marxism Russell Jacoby ironically enough began with a critique of obsolescence that is strictly speaking identical to the one I am advocating here. “In the name of a new era past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought,” Jacoby writes, with great sarcasm: “The intensification of the drive for surplus value and profit accelerates the rate at which past goods are liquidated to make way for new goods; planned obsolescence is everywhere, from consumer goods to thinking to sexuality.”23 Nowhere does the dilemma posed by this obsolescence make itself felt more clearly than in the case of the debates surrounding attempts to amalgamate a certain Freudo-Marxism. The difficult task of articulation in this context consists in avoiding a purely external relation of complementarity between the social and the psychic, the collective and the individual, the political and the sexual. “The various efforts to interpret Marx and Freud have been plagued by reductionism: the inability to retain the tension between individual and society, psychology and political economy,” Jacoby remarks, before proposing what he calls a dialectical counter-articulation, inspired by the example of the Frankfurt School: “Critical theory does not know a sharp break between these two dimensions; they are neither rendered identical nor absolutely severed. In its pursuit of this dialectical relationship it has resisted the two forms of positivism that lose the tension: psychologism and sociologism.”24 Marxism and psychoanalysis can be articulated, in other words, only if the articulation at the same time retains the antagonistic kernel that defines the core of their respective discourses.
Through the critique of amnesia and oblivion, however, we should not come to overestimate the importance of memory either. History and memory, too, whether in personal memoires, nostalgic reminiscences, or public apostasies, have today become commodities that risk concealing more than they may be able to reveal. Nor should we ignore the recent past by resorting exclusively to the alleged orthodoxy of the founding texts of Marxism and psychoanalysis. “The critique of sham novelty and the planned obsolescence of thought cannot in turn flip the coin and claim that the old texts—be they of Marx or Freud—are as valid as when written and need no interpretation or rethinking,” warns Jacoby. “To the point that the theories of Marx and Freud were critiques of bourgeois civilization, orthodoxy entailed loyalty to these critiques; more exactly dialectical loyalty. Not repetition is called for but articulation and developments of concepts; and within Marxism—and to a degree within psychoanalysis—precisely against an Official Orthodoxy only too happy to freeze concepts into formulas.”25 Whence the need not just for remembrance to break the spell of amnesia, but also for a form of active forgetting to avoid the commodification, or what we might also call the becoming-culture, of memory.
As Gilles Deleuze posits in “Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis,” a text from 1973 included in the posthumous collection Desert Islands and Other Texts,
In the end, a Freudo-Marxist effort proceeds in general from a return to origins, or more specifically to the sacred texts: the sacred texts of Freud, the sacred texts of Marx. Our point of departure
